Poor Zimbabwe villagers hope vote brings change

UMGUZA, Zimbabwe (Reuters) - Like many other Zimbabweans, villager Betty Sithuthu's main hope is that Saturday's elections will help put more food on her table.

"We just hope that this voting of ours will change the way that we are living here," said 35-year-old Sithuthu after casting her vote at Gadade village in Umguza in the southern Matabeleland province, an opposition stronghold.

President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party wrestled the Umguza seat from the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in the last parliamentary elections in 2005.

The opposition says that vote was rigged and believes the ruling party will cheat again this time too.

ZANU-PF says the villagers changed their minds because they had been given land under a redistribution program and were disillusioned with the MDC for failing to improve their lives when it held the seat before.

This time around, villagers reliant on subsistence farming say the government has not offered enough aid after drought ravaged their crops and everyone talks of change.

"Things have been too hard for too long. I think now there needs to be a change and they (government) need to take us more seriously," said Sithuthu's neighbor Sagodolu Sikhosana, who also voted in Saturday's crucial Zimbabwean election.

Mugabe faces an unprecedented challenge from main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and former ally Simba Makoni.

Mugabe, 84, has been in power since 1980 and is widely blamed for an economic crisis that has left Zimbabweans grappling with chronic shortages of food, fuel, water, electricity and the world's highest inflation rate.

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The crisis has hit urban dwellers -- from whom the MDC draws most of its support -- the hardest.

Residents in rural areas have not felt the impact of frequent electricity cuts and regular municipal water cuts that has hit those living in town. Country dwellers did not have those services before anyway.

Mugabe's heartland is in the rural areas of his Shona people, the largest of Zimbabwe's ethnic groups. Before the election, there were signs that the economic crisis was affecting support there too.

A local journalist covering the vote in the southern Masvingo province, traditionally loyal to ZANU-PF, said voters turned up in their thousands but many appeared to have been brought to the voting stations.

"I talked to some of them, and they said the village heads had been telling them to vote correctly, which means to vote for ZANU-PF," said the journalist, who declined to be named. "If they win here, it will also be due to intimidation."

In drought-prone Matabeleland, where thousands died in a five-year insurgency put down by Mugabe in the 1980s, the economic meltdown has been a further incentive to vote against the ruling party.

Mugabe blames the difficulties on sabotage by Western governments opposed to his controversial seizure of white-owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks.

"As you can see there is no food in our fields," said Sithuthu, pointing to her field of wilting maize, explaining that a failed crop meant she would not be able to pay school fees for her three children.

They live in two dilapidated mud huts with sackcloth for windows.

"We hope that the new government coming in will look after us and our children," she said.

"We want our kids to get better education and have a better future, but we can't afford the fees."

(Editing by Marius Bosch and Matthew Tostevin)